One of the most time consuming tasks in acute patient care is the coordination of care and communication between healthcare providers while providing services to multiple patients. Such communication and coordination is typically performed through telephonic communication, which provides significant delay in coordinating healthcare services. This delay is caused, in part, by the need to interrupt workflow and find relevant contact information for healthcare providers. Indeed, one may walk into any busy hospital unit, emergency room or intensive care unit, for example, and see multiple clinicians simultaneously on the telephone. The clinicians who take care of multiple patients simultaneously must make frequent phone calls to coordinate care and schedule resources such as studies, medications, treatments, and transfers. Unfortunately, these clinicians need to interrupt care, so that they could locate a chart, paper phone list, etc, or otherwise manually lookup phone numbers or other contact information that they have not memorized.
Another cause of delay in coordinating healthcare services results from having to make repeated phone calls when necessary healthcare providers are not available. Indeed, many doctors are contacted via pagers, and consequently, such doctors may or may not return the call or even be available. For example, a nurse paging a doctor may have to wait until the doctor finishes treating another patient or traveling between care facilities before the doctor returns the call. Unfortunately, every time a nurse, doctor or clinician has to interrupt his or her workflow to retrieve a phone number or make a repeated call results in both a time cost and an additional productivity loss for the task being interrupted.
Another problem associated with communication between healthcare providers is the need to track unanswered calls that need to be repeated. The task of remembering whom to call again and when to do so is especially difficult for a healthcare provider who is simultaneously taking care of several patients. The task of manually tracking calls that need to be repeated is typically the most significant source of interruption, error and delay in providing efficient patient care. Indeed, because potentially dozens of other patient assessment, care and communication tasks are being performed at the same time, a healthcare provider may forget to repeat a previous unanswered call until he/she is reminded. Moreover, for patients with certain conditions, multiple calls have to be made repetitively (e.g., for a heart attack patient, recalling the cath lab, the interventional cardiologist, the pharmacist, the attending physician of record) and it is easy to forget to make one or more of these calls. Each failure to call back in a timely fashion adds its own delay to the process of care. Paradoxically, the sicker the patient is and the more care required, the more likely it is that repeat phone calls will be needed and the more likely it is that these phone calls will be forgotten or delayed.
Typically, in a clinical care environment, healthcare providers will either rely on their memory for commonly called phone numbers or rely on phone directories, ubiquitous paper lists, and/or scribbled phone numbers to obtain necessary contact information. For patient specific phone numbers (such as those of the patient's physicians or responsible family members), such information is typically accessed from either a chart that has to be located or a demographic section of an HIS that has to be manually accessed.
Accordingly, there is a need for an automated system and method for managing healthcare communication that would minimize the delay and disruption in providing health services as described above.